Talk:Castilian languages

No such term

I have proposed that this article be deleted, as it gives the erroneous impression that a term such as "Castilian languages" exists. As I noted in the body of the article, the term appears in only one place: the online Ethnologue. Print versions of Ethnologue do not use the term. I have examined the 10th, 11th, and 12th editions (1984, 1988, 1992), as well as the 1993 Ethnologue Language Family Index. All these publications show the smallest group to which Spanish belongs as "North Central Ibero-Romance", with Castilian being one of its five to nine dialects. Spanish is not a "Castilian language"; Castilian is a Spanish dialect. (The dog is not a variety of boxer; the boxer is a variety of dog.)

"Extremaduran" is mentioned, as a dialect of Spanish, in only one of these four publications. See Talk:Extremaduran_language for a taste of the controversy over whether Extremaduran is a language or not.

As I mentioned in my footnote to the article, the phrase "the Castilian languages", referring to a group of languages, does not appear in the 15 million books of the Google Books project.

"Castilian languages" as the name of a group of languages is a spurious term, used virtually nowhere in the literature, and Wikipedia should not continue to mislead readers into thinking it is a recognized category. Kotabatubara (talk) 22:10, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

If you disagree with the title of an article, the solution is to move it, not to delete it.

I think Ethnologue counts as "the literature", but if we agree that Extremaduran is a dialect of Spanish, then this would be merged into Spanish anyway. Are we okay to move it to Extremaduran dialect, and to add the ISO code [ext] to Spanish language? If not, what should we call Spanish+Extremaduran, or should we merge this into West Iberian languages?

This ties in to whether we considere Mirandese a dialect of Asturian and merge Asturian with Astur-Leonese. — kwami (talk) 22:53, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I have no vested interest in deciding what is a language and what is a dialect. What does concern me is the prospect of misleading Wikipedia readers with the notion that the phrase "Castilian languages" has any currency in writing about speech in Spain. Where is the evidence that any linguist other than the editor of Ethnologue has accepted the term "Castilian languages" to name a category of languages or dialects? Kotabatubara (talk) 03:57, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Propose a better name and we can move there. — kwami (talk) 04:51, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

I am unable to suggest a better name for the "group" of languages because I frankly don't understand what criteria for inclusion were used by the editors of Ethnologue. According to Ethnologue (17th ed.), the set includes four members: (1) Extremaduran (with a "language"-vs.-"dialect" controversy raging on its Wiki "Talk" page); (2) Ladino; (3) Spanish (which I assume would be considered the superset that includes the Extramaduran "dialect" by those who accept the latter term, as well as the superset that includes Loreto-Ucayali Spanish, if the latter is classified as a dialect rather than a language); and (4) Loreto-Ucayali Spanish (which, according to Amazonic Spanish, is "sometimes" classified as a language separate from "standard Spanish", with "sometimes" supported by nothing more than, again, Ethnologue. The Amazonic Spanish article thoughtfully adds that Ethnologue's reasons for the classification are "poorly documented". The selection of these four disparate language varieties seems to have been cobbled together by someone unfamiliar with Spain's many patrias chicas and the amount of dialectal variation in the Spanish of the Americas. I see Ethnologue making assertions that are not supported by any other source. Renaming this "group" seems as impossible as finding the appropriate title for an article on dogs, boxers, and bears. Kotabatubara (talk) 17:21, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

I have thoroughly rewritten the article to accurately reflect the source of the term (namely Ethnologue), its currency (or lack thereof) with other authors, and to cite and cross-reference all four members of the proposed group. I hope this solution is satisfactory to all, and I withdraw my call for deletion of the article. Kotabatubara (talk) 10:36, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

The crux of these and other discussions seems to be the unlimited faith of some editors in the tree model. The tree model simply does not work for the Romance languages, or probably for any other narrow language family. Jotamar (talk) 16:24, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Kwamikagami, please explain why you have reverted the article to its previous form as a stub. Did you find some statement in the longer form inaccurate? Do you object to having the article include reference to Loreto-Ucayali Spanish as Ethnologue does? I have explained why I rewrote the article. You can't revert it and expect the reversion to stand if you don't explain in detail. Kotabatubara (talk) 13:51, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

You turned the article into a dictionary entry; I reverted per WP:DICT. The article should be about the topic, not about the name. We should be able to move it to a different name like "Spanish–Extremaduran languages" (just to make one up) without significant effect on the content. — kwami (talk) 18:45, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

The name is "Castilian languages". The topic is the act of selecting four "languages" (let's call all four of them languages for the sake of the present discussion) and grouping them together as a category. Further development of the topic might have involved an explanation of what linguistic characteristics uniquely brought together these four speech forms, and no others, to form the category—but Ethnologue, the originator of the category, is silent on that account. Further development of the topic might also have involved description of each of the four languages, if they didn't each already have their own Wikipedia articles where they are described. My rewrite of March 11 enumerated Ethnologue's four languages—of which the original stub had listed only three—and made cross-referencing links to all four of the other Wikipedia articles where fuller description of each language could be found. My rewrite gave all the information about the topic that was given by its originator, Ethnologue, namely the selection and grouping of the four languages. Speculation on my part about Ethnologue's criteria for selection would have constituted "original research", which is inappropriate in Wikipedia. My rewrite additionally provided access, namely the links, to information on each of the four languages. I treated both the name and the topic fully; the claim that I "turned the article into a dictionary entry" is unjustified. Kotabatubara (talk) 12:13, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Opening with "Castilian languages is the name given by Ethnologue" makes it a dictionary entry. It's not appropriate for WP. You're also concentrating on trivia about Ethnologue rather than a general coverage of the topic. Ethnologue is not the only source which claims that Extremaduran or Ladino are languages most closely related to Spanish. And you're making false claims such as "the Extremaduran language is referenced as distinct from Extremaduran dialects of Spanish."

If you wish to say these are all dialects of Spanish, I have no objection. All that would be needed IMO is to add the ISO codes [lad], [spq], and [ext] to [spa] in the info box in the Spanish article. Then we could simply delete this article and redirect the name to Spanish language. — kwami (talk) 16:56, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

The distinction language/dialect is not linguistic, but political and social. Extremaduran and even Ladino might be classified as dielects of Spanish, or not, but what is obvious is that they have their idiosyncrasies and for that reason cannot be appropriately dealt with in the same pages as the general Spanish dialects. Now, why on earth should everything be classified at all costs. A category such as Romance linguistic varieties originating in the Iberian Peninsula is more than enough. If the reader wants to know more, there is the article for it. What I don't find appropriate for WP is inventing new tags, or getting them from a single source, even more when that source has so many obvious shortcomings as Ethnologue. Jotamar (talk) 16:01, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

Fine. Change Iberian Romance and the other supporting articles so that they support what you want for these articles, and we'll have no problem. But as long as those article present Romance as a collection of languages made up of dialects, then we'll have a compatibility problem if we don't follow that here. — kwami (talk) 06:28, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Merge this article

This is not a real term, per the earlier discussion. It is also a tremendously confusing term since "Castilian" is normally used for Castilian Spanish or to distinguish against the various West Iberian languages; in other words, in English, if somebody is talking about Castilian rather than Spanish, they are 99.8% of the time saying so to make clear they're not talking about Latin American Spanish, Aragonese, etc. The fact that Ethnologue used it once is just a single source. Wikipedia does not need to mimic Ethnologue word-for-word, article-for-article. There can be a single line in West Iberian languages that mentions Ethnologue's further classifications, and leave it at that; no content will be lost. SnowFire (talk) 12:36, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jotamar and PK2: As the above section suggests, I'd definitely be in favor of merging this article. It does not appear to be a commonly used classification, and if merging it caused "havoc" elsewhere, then that can be fixed in other ways. But happy to be convinced otherwise? Thoughts? SnowFire (talk) 05:17, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

@SnowFire I've created an AFD for the page. There really isn't much if any material to merge here, so I proposed a simple redirect there. HappyWith (talk) 19:14, 6 July 2023 (UTC)